She knew I was leaving, perhaps had swung by only to take a look, window-shop, nothing more, and that somehow, according to my own secret scale of things, she had failed to measure up. Even so, she took it in her stride.

"Well, I"m glad to have met you," she said. She offered her hand. "Good-bye, Mr. Chase."

I pumped her hand, then released it, turned and headed back down the hill to my car. I knew she was watching me, perhaps even hoping that I might swing around, stroll up to her again, boldly invite her to dinner or a dance. In earlier years I might have done just that, followed the normal route of courtship, marriage, parenthood. But by then I felt sure that I"d walked the rogue"s path far too long ever to abandon it, that the call of romance was one I would never hear, nor, if I heard it, be foolish enough to heed. That world was for Billy, strewn with roses and punctuated with breathy, melodramatic sighs. I could imagine my mother looking on approvingly as he sank deeper and deeper into the trough of such romance, offering me only a sidelong glance, a whispered judgment: Stay with your wh.o.r.es, Cal. You lack the heart for more.

Snow fell thickly as I left Royston. It continued to fall for the next hour, growing more dense as I neared Port Alma.

It was as I approached Pine Road that I thought once again of Molly Hendricks, saw her in my mind as she"d last appeared to me, a small figure crouched and freezing as she trailed behind her father, leaving tiny footprints in the snow.

As I came to a halt in Hendricks"s driveway, the snow suddenly stopped and a burst of sunlight swept down upon the blackened heap that had once been the house. Beyond the rubble, the shed stood, all its somber details brilliantly visible in a dazzling light, its weathered roof, the rusty tools nailed to its clapboard sides, two tiny windows, each covered with what appeared to be thick woolen blankets.

I"d gotten halfway to it when I noticed that there were no tracks in the snow around it. Clearly, neither Hendricks nor Molly had been outside for a time. They might be huddled in the shed, of course, but no smoke came from the black pipe that pierced its roof, and in the cold, it seemed unlikely they would have remained inside without a fire.

I tapped lightly at the door. When no one answered, I stepped over to one of the windows. The blanket appeared to have been put up hastily, leaving an uneven s.p.a.ce of nearly two inches above the sill. I peered inside. In the shadows I could see Molly Hendricks lying faceup on a sagging cot. Her eyes were closed, her face colorless save for the slender line of blood that ran from the left corner of her mouth, then gathered in a frozen pool near her head.

Inside, I found them both, Molly with a single bullet hole at the back of her head, her father sitting upright in a wooden chair no more than five feet away, a smear of dried blood caked around his mouth and spreading in a black stain across the front of his shirt. The bullet had gone through the roof of his mouth, exited at the rear of his skull. His eyes were wide open, so that he looked shocked, perhaps horrified, either by the force of the explosion or by his first glimpse of the world that awaited him, no less cruel and inadequate, on the other side.

Billy was waiting on the curb, stamping his feet in the deepening snow when I pulled up at the Sentinel. He was not alone. Dora stood beside him. Puffs of condensed air burst from her lips, and even after my brother had ushered her into the backseat of my car, she looked deathly cold.

We said nothing as we headed toward Pine Road, nothing as I guided the car into Carl Hendricks"s drive. In that silence, Dora seemed truly distant and inscrutable, like a statue that draws light into it rather than giving it off, darkens whatever s.p.a.ce it occupies.

After discovering the two bodies, I"d gone directly to my office, of course, called Hap, told him what I"d found in the shed, then phoned the Sentinel and given Billy the same details. "I"m going back out there," I told him. "You want to come?"

"Yes, of course," he"d replied.

"I covered Molly"s face," I told Billy as we got out of the car. "I left everything else the same."

Dora had gotten out along with us, and was now standing beside the car, her arms gathered protectively at her chest, flakes of snow gathering on her shoulders and clinging to her hair. "You want to see this?" I asked her.

"No, I don"t," she answered firmly, sinking her hands into the pockets of her thin coat. "I"ll stay here."

Billy and I walked past the remains of the gutted house, then to the shed. "I hope you"re ready for this," I warned him as I opened the door.

For a time he gazed at Molly Hendricks. Then he turned to Carl, flinching suddenly. "Good G.o.d," he whispered.

"Isn"t very pretty, is it?" I asked.

His eyes returned to Molly. "She"s just a child. You always wonder how someone could hurt a child." He looked at me. "But then, most people can"t. I guess that"s what we cling to."

That was true enough, although I knew that I"d long ago accepted such lethal mayhem as the inescapable result of our disordered nature, and which no scheme for improvement, no matter how trivial or vast, would ever change one whit or in any way undo.

Billy bent forward, touched a curl of Molly"s hair.

Watching him from the door, I sensed the tenderness he extended toward everything, an almost primordial sympathy, something taken with us out of paradise.

He straightened, moved to the stove and touched it. "It"s been cold for a long time," he said softly.

"My guess is, they were already in here when I came by Sat.u.r.day evening. Already dead, I mean."

"Probably," Billy said. He looked at Molly again. "Poor thing" was all he said.

A moment later, we walked out into the swirling snow.

"I guess Carl just couldn"t figure any way out," my brother said.

"Then he should have thought a little harder."

"People get trapped in things, Cal." He glanced toward the car, Dora standing beside it. "She was terrified that this was going to happen."

I ducked my head against the cold, thought of old Ed Dillard, now this. A thought pa.s.sed through my mind: Death follows her.

Hap pulled into the drive just as Billy and I reached my car.

"T.R."s on his way," he told me. He looked at Billy. "Well, I guess you were right. There was something wrong here." He glanced toward Dora, his gaze lingering on her briefly, so that he appeared to recognize her distantly, like a photograph he"d once seen in a book. Then he stepped away, moving purposefully toward the shed. Halfway to it, he snapped a branch from a bare sapling. He slapped it softly against his leg as he walked the rest of the way, scattering a burst of snow.

I gave the little shed a final glance, then looked over to where Dora and my brother stood together. Billy was talking quietly, no doubt describing what he"d seen inside it. Even served cold, it would be a disturbing vision, and I expected Dora to do the usual womanly thing upon receiving it, either collapse in my brother"s arms or bury her weeping face into his broad shoulder. She did no such thing, however, only nodded from time to time, as if in response to quite ordinary news. It wasn"t until after Billy had stepped away that I saw her body tighten suddenly, grow taut, rigid, as if to squeeze back into its cage whatever raged inside her.

Chapter Twelve.

A few days of unseasonably warm weather thawed the ground enough to bury Molly Hendricks six days later. Hap thought someone from the office should make an appearance at the funeral, and since my brother had to some extent been involved in what Hap called "the Hendricks matter," he gave the job to me.

The ceremony, such as it was, was almost over by the time I got there. Standing at a distance, I could see Billy and Dora gathered with a few of Hendricks"s neighbors from Pine Road.

Reverend Cates conducted the funeral with his usual solemnity. The course of every life, he said, followed a strange and unknowable direction. We might work to probe the mystery, but it would always elude us. For we were lost, like sheep in a deep valley, wandering in the darkness, without guidance or direction, driven here and there by mere circ.u.mstance, undone by pure chance. The darkness was impenetrable, and so we groped and stumbled, fell into traps and snares. We had been brought here to suffer, he told the small gathering,to be broken into submission, wounded again and again, so that we might find within those wounds the force and grace of love.

When it was over, Reverend Cates grabbed a handful of snow-encrusted earth and tossed it onto the plain wooden coffin the citizens of Port Alma had managed to buy for their murdered daughter. After that, we headed in ragged lines down the hill to the main road. Only Billy lingered at the grave, no doubt gathering thoughts for the column he"d write later that day, leaving Dora to make her way down alone.

"Well, you were right, Dora," I said as I came up behind her. "About Molly, I mean. That her father intended to kill her. My brother told me that you sensed things."

I"d meant it as a kind of praise, a recognition of her intuitive powers, but I could see she had little use for compliments. Still, I did not relent.

"What did you sense in Molly Hendricks?" I asked, my tone suddenly insistent. "That she was going to be hurt?"

"That she"d already been hurt."

"And that looked like ... what?"

"Helplessness. Like someone was holding her down."

"Why didn"t I see it?"

She didn"t answer, but I saw the answer in her eyes: Because it"s never happened to you.

"I saw you, you know," I told her. "At the seawall that night. In the fog."

Dora held her attention on the black, wrought iron gate at the bottom of the hill. "You walk at night," she said. It was not a question.

"Sometimes."

She appeared to take my answer as confirmation of my solitary habits, the improvisations I had built to hold my life together. I sensed that she"d built a similar structure, erected walls and fences to keep in what she needed, keep out what she could not endure.

"I prefer the night," I said.

"Why?"

The question seemed innocent enough, and yet I felt that I was suddenly under interrogation, like a suspect in a detective novel, squirming in his chair, the naked bulb shining cruelly overhead. "I"ve never really thought about it," I answered. "I suppose I like the solitude."

"Do you draw at night?"

"Draw?"

"Billy says you draw."

I laughed. "I haven"t drawn anything in years. He means when I was a kid."

"Did you keep them?"

"Yes, I did. I hung them in my study."

"I"d like to see them sometime."

"I wouldn"t bother. They"re not any good. I"m not the artist type. And even if I were, I"m not--"

"Not what?"

To my surprise, the answer pained me. "Gifted at anything."

She smiled quietly. "Neither am I," she said.

We walked on down the hill in silence, said goodbye at the bottom of it. I headed for my car while Dora remained in place, standing by the old iron gate, waiting for my brother to join her there. It was perhaps the last time I felt that she was no more than she seemed to be, of few words, with an edginess that was clearly more intense than most, but still well within the range of other women I"d known, no less likely to get over whatever it was Billy felt so certain had happened to her.

I gave her no further thought as I drove back into town. Once there, I went directly to my office, hoping to catch up on my work.

But when I arrived, I found Jack Stout coming down the corridor that led to my office. He"d just delivered Charlie Younger to Sheriff Pritchart.

""Afternoon, Mr. Chase."

I could tell by the congratulatory sparkle in Jack"s eyes that he"d brought news from New York.

"I had some luck on that job you gave me. About that woman. Dora March." He said her name with a curious emphasis.

I ushered him into my office, offered him a cigar, which he took but didn"t smoke, slipping it into his shirt pocket instead.

"What did you find out?"

"Well, she lived at that residence hall, all right," Jack said. "Tremont Residence Hall for Women, it"s called." He took a sc.r.a.p of paper from his pocket, soiled, sticky. "An old woman runs the place. "Bout sixty, I"d say. Name of Mrs. Posy Cameron." He looked up from the paper. "That"s who I talked to."

"Did she remember Dora?"

"Well, sort of."

"Sort of?"

"Remembered that she"d lived there." He glanced at the note again. "But not much about her."

I remained silent, waiting. I knew there was more.

"She gave me something though," Jack said. "Something the woman left in her room. Mrs. Cameron kept it in storage, thinking Miss March might send a forwarding address. But she never did." Again he reached into the pocket of his jacket, drew out a magazine, rolled up and held curled by a rubber band. "So she gave it to me," he said as he handed it across the desk. "Told me to give it to Miss March, but I figured I"d give it to you first."

I stripped off the rubber band and let the magazine unroll in my hand. It was called Astonishing True Stories, and seemed to be a religious publication of sorts, with lead lines that suggested tales of miraculous cures, unexpected rescues, answered prayers, the reappearance of the dead.

"I was flipping through it on the way home, and I found a story you might be interested in." Jack"s tone darkened somewhat, as if it were not a magazine at all but some creature he"d stumbled upon in the deep wood, neither snake nor scorpion, but small and deadly anyway, something he"d never seen before. "Page thirty-one."

I began leafing through the pages, strange pictures flashing here and there, a boy with three arms, a dog riding a goat, a boa coiled around a dugout canoe.

"The story"s about a little girl," Jack said. "Left out in the open."

I found the story and began to read it, following the first sightings, a little girl running naked in the wilderness, her skin brown and leathery, the soles of her feet thick as shoe soles, but graced, as the magazine"s only color ill.u.s.tration made clear, with a wild mane of long, blond hair.

"It"s the second page that has the punch," Jack said.

I turned the page, found what he meant. "Dora March," I said.

Jack grinned. "That"s what they named her. Them doctors."

I nodded, then read on, followed the story as far as the magazine presented it, the fact that it was English doctors who"d finally claimed her, brought her to London from the Spanish Pyrenees, where she"d first been sighted, named her Dora, from d"oro, Spanish for "of gold," meaning the color of her hair, and Marzo, also Spanish, for the month she"d first been sighted, and which the English had later Anglicized to "March." In a final rendering, "Dora March" squatted naked in the corner of a bare room, scrubbed clean, her legs drawn up against her chest, her waist-length hair gleaming in the hard white light.

"Looks like her, don"t it?" Jack asked.

"Looks like who?"

"That woman at the Sentinel. You think it could be her, Mr. Chase?"

"You didn"t get to the end of the article, did you, Jack?"

"No, sir."

"This little girl was found in Europe. In 1889."

Jack peered at me wonderingly.

"She died twenty years ago."